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CDT Bookshelf: Interview with Jeremy Wallacehttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/03/cdt-bookshelf-interview-jeremy-wallace/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/03/cdt-bookshelf-interview-jeremy-wallace/#commentsFri, 06 Mar 2015 06:27:25 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=181810Jeremy Wallace is assistant professor of political science at Ohio State University and the author of Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China (Oxford University Press 2014), which explains how China has remained stable in the face of massive government-led urbanization efforts. I spoke with Wallace about his research.

China Digital Times: How did you become interested in researching urbanization, redistribution, and regime survival in China?

Jeremy Wallace: After meeting someone and mentioning that I write about Chinese politics, the first questions are almost inevitable: “when is China going to democratize?” and “when will the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lose power?” That everyone is asking these questions shows their importance but also points to the difficulty in answering them. China’s urbanization is a tremendously important change both within the country and globally. As for redistribution, I tend to believe in the maxim that to understand an organization, it’s best to follow the money.

Social scientists have long written about the political logic of what they have called “urban bias” in the developing world. It makes sense to tax farmers and redistribute the benefits to city dwellers since people in cities are politically powerful because of their proximity to each other and the seat of power. Yet in China in the early 2000s was doing the opposite—after years of pro-city bias, the government was beginning to abolish agricultural taxes and subsidize farming. In fact, the language used evoked the family life-cycle: parents raise their children, and then children help their parents in turn when they age. Explaining China’s puzzling move away from urban bias drew me into the project.

CDT: Describe your experience researching this book. Did you face challenges accessing or finding resources on population data, the hukou system, or urbanization in China?

JW: Compared to many researchers, my topics were not particularly sensitive. The Chinese government was trumpeting its changing redistributive policy in newspapers and speeches. Local officials were more than happy to brag about the abolition of agricultural taxes in their counties, townships, and villages. But even here, I would couch my questions in terms of the positive policy changes of today while still trying to probe the logic of the older system. Working on the hukou system was more difficult in two ways. In cities, officials especially in the ministry of public security were not interested in talking about the system’s political logic. In the countryside, I found local officials were reluctant to talk about how the system affected their populations or engage in hypothetical discussions of what would happen if the hukou system were abolished. As for population data, I think that it’s fair to say that I have a complicated relationship with Chinese official data of all kinds. I’ve written elsewhere questioning the veracity of GDP statistics. Population data, in part because of the legacy of the hukou system, remains problematic, but, that being said, official data remain the best that we have and so are used. I do augment the analysis with one additional resource: estimates of population growth collected from satellite imagery of nighttime lights, such as the picture on the cover of Cities and Stability.

CDT: Why does China have so few slums?

JW: The short answer is the hukou system. The longer answer involves going back to the hukou system’s origins. After coming to power on the back of peasant support, the CCP quickly turned its back on farmers. The government in the 1950s was following a model of economic development that had been used in the Soviet Union, focusing on building large factories emphasizing heavy industry. The way that they paid for those factories was through agricultural taxes. Farmers understood the score and wanted to be part of the new urban proletariat working in the factories rather than have their efforts in the fields taxed away to build those factories. By the millions farmers “blindly flowed” to cities looking for jobs, and the regime created the household registration (hukou) system to prevent such migration. Under the planned economy, in order to purchase goods, one needed permission. Food coupons, in particular, would be tied to one’s hukou locality, so that even if you made it to a nearby city, your coupons wouldn’t allow you to purchase basic necessities once you got there. Even after the plan began to be phased out with the economic reforms of the 1980s, those without urban hukou would be discriminated against in cities. Social services—health, education, and housing—would be inaccessible. These barriers for migrants are highest in the largest cities, while smaller cities are more open to migrants. This discrimination, along with rural land policies, keep millions of migrants thinking of their lives in cities as temporary rather than permanent. When combined with repression—bulldozing slum-like urban villages—these policies have allowed China to urbanize without the slums that plague other developing countries.

CDT: You preface the book with a quotation from Gu Yanwu (1613-1682). The quotation reads in translation: “When the masses dwell in villages, order prevails; when the masses flock to the cities, disorder ensues.” How does the rural unrest that has occurred in China’s countryside over the last decade and the Chinese government’s management of it fit in with the notion that overpopulating cities could destabilize the CCP?

JW: It was heartening to find that the arguments that I was making resonated with claims from so long ago. While it is clear that land disputes as well as rural unrest arising from other issues are very common in contemporary China, I think that these kinds of small scale disputes are unlikely to lead to the ousting of the CCP. Every year, China sees hundreds of thousands of individuals protest, petition, and block traffic, but because these people and demonstrations are spread out—geographically and temporally—they remain more nuisance than existential threat. A single large scale urban protest movement, on the other hand, can shake a regime to its foundations such as happened in 1989 in China or in Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011.

CDT: You repeatedly say that the CCP has made a “Faustian bargain,” or a deal with the devil, because of its bias towards cities. How much would China stand to lose if its urban concentration became too high? What do you see as the most compelling evidence to suggest that “slum-dwellers” in cities could form a stronger identity and collectivize against the CCP? To what extent do people living in slums in China today express dissent towards the central leadership? Also, what other problems would the CCP face, especially environmental, if urbanization efforts escalated?

JW: I argue that urban bias represents a Faustian bargain, a deal with the devil, because it makes sense in the short run but can end up undermining governments in the end. Taxing farmers to subsidize city dwellers may keep the streets of the capital clear today, but over time, more and more of those farmers will move to favored cities—especially capital cities—making them even more dangerous. It is important to clarify that large cities are dangerous for dictators in multiple ways. The first is simply the power of large numbers: great cities have lots of people living inside of them, which makes the possibility of large-scale protests erupting greater as the proportion of the population that needs to turn up to make a big protest declines with the city’s population. By this measure, Beijing (or Shanghai) is certainly a dangerous city as it is massive by any account. The second is slightly different and goes back to urban concentration—the share of the country’s urban population in its largest city. When a country is dominated by one large city (sometimes called a primate city), its street politics can come to dominate the country’s politics. China, due to the hukou system as well as the country’s size, is not dominated by its largest cities—in fact, it has urbanized in a very distributed fashion.

While I do argue that slums are dangerous politically, that danger does not tend to manifest itself through direct political action by slumdwellers. Instead, slums symbolize the government’s failures and can spark mobilization—either by other elites in the form of a coup or among the broader urban population concerned with the health, safety, and employment threats that slums may represent—that can bring down dictators.

China’s urbanization policies have promoted inefficient land use and the growth of smaller cities, both of which have negative environmental and economic effects. While the urbanization of people has progressed rapidly for the past three decades, the urbanization of China’s land has grown even faster. Given its vast population and limited arable land, this style of city growth—ring roads and super-developments—is undermining China’s ability to feed itself. Economically, large cities are engines of vitality for the development of new ideas and industries; the more that China attempts to divert individuals to smaller locales, the more opportunities for the right people to be in the right place at the right time it misses.

CDT: How has China’s hukou system “short-circuited the Faustian bargain of urban bias”? Also, what did you learn about the Chinese government’s management of rural people through the hukou system that surprised you?

JW: The hukou system gave China a loophole to the Faustian bargain of urban bias by allowing the government to still bias policies in favor of urbanites while keeping farmers in the countryside.

Many observers of China think that the regime is mostly concerned about economic growth. While growth is of course important, the hukou system demonstrates that the government is willing to trade off some economic development for political stability. Restricting the free movement of Chinese citizens around the country and implementing discriminatory policies against migrants in cities retards economic growth, but the regime continues to keep these policies in place because of their political benefits. I suppose the biggest surprise for me during the writing of this book was the global financial crisis, which took off after I had essentially finished the dissertation that this book is based on. More people lost their jobs in China during the crisis than anywhere else, but in large part due to the hukou system and the stimulus policies, the crisis passed very quickly and the regime avoided what could have been a tremendously dangerous moment.

CDT: What challenges, if any, do you find in comparing China’s urbanization and regime stability with urbanization and regime stability of other countries?

JW: There is a tension in the argument when it comes to China between urban concentration and the danger of large cities. While the government has enacted policies to restrict migration into Beijing and to ensure that it is filled with those who have been well served by the economic reforms, everyone that lives or visits Beijing knows its enormity. This size represents a danger, despite all of the management of urbanization that the government has undertaken.

CDT: Why have scholars focused more on studying the death, rather than the birth and stability, of regimes?

JW: Stability is a hard story to tell because, like other tales of success, it has many fathers. If one wants to know about what causes some regimes to endure and others to fail, it seems natural to look closely at the failures. When a regime endures, it simply endures. Where to look and to assign credit are difficult to parse. Cities and Stability addresses this problem by examining cross-national patterns of regime survival to provide evidence in support of the danger of cities and urban concentration before returning to China’s management of urbanization.

CDT: What’s next for you?

JW: One of the reasons that cities are dangerous for governments is that it is difficult to see inside of them. Observing and governing threats in the urban environment is an incredibly complex challenge because there are so many people in such proximity to each other. One way that the Chinese government has tried to address this problem is by counting threats and everything else. My next project explores the ways in which the Chinese government has ruled through numbers—GDP, PM 2.5, FDI, kilometers of high speed rail completed—for good and for ill.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/03/cdt-bookshelf-interview-jeremy-wallace/feed/0Can China’s Dying Villages Be Saved?http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/01/can-chinas-dying-villages-saved/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2015/01/can-chinas-dying-villages-saved/#commentsTue, 06 Jan 2015 18:18:06 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=180295China’s urban population has grown faster than any other country’s and is currently 54% of the total population. The fast rate of urbanization has resulted in the disappearance of villages as large numbers of rural residents leave for jobs offered in the cities. Linda Poon reports for National Public Radio on a documentary that explores the possibility of reversing the urbanization process through a project by artist Ou Ning:

Ou Ning is the subject of the documentary Down to the Countryside by filmmakers Sun Yunfan and Leah Thompson. The 12-minute film follows the artist-turned-activist as he tries to bring economic and cultural development to a village struggling to survive China’s rapid urbanization. He’s part of the emerging “back-to-the-land” movement in China.

[…] With the country caught up in moving into the cities, Ou Ning wanted to created a livelier community for the Bishan villagers. So in 2011, he and fellow artist Zuo Jing founded the Bishan Project in a bid to bring business and entertainment to the village and improve the financial outlook for villagers. For example, he convinced the owners of a bookstore from a nearby town to open a branch in Bishan. His wife now manages the bookstore, which has been attracting local tourist.

The project is part of China’s growing “back-to-the-land” movement – or the New Rural Reconstruction Movement — in which entrepreneurs are trying to revitalize villages and create a sustainable life for those still living in them. The movement, which started around 2009, is small for now, with only 200 projects. [Source]

[…] Q.In your book you describe how China escaped the usual social unrest that accompanies preferential policies for cities thanks to its hukou, or household registration, system.

A. […] “Most poor countries favor cities to promote development and ensure that people living in cities are pro-government. I argue that this kind of “urban bias” might tamp down protests today but also encourages more and more farmers to move to favored cities. These large cities, often full of slums, can explode. Urban protests can quickly overwhelm regimes, even seemingly stable ones like Mubarak’s in Egypt. China’s hukou system is a loophole to this Faustian bargain: favoring urbanites while keeping farmers in the countryside and smaller cities.”

[…] Q: What’s the problem with big cities for an authoritarian government?

A. “Big cities are dangerous because they are more likely to produce economically and politically destabilizing protests. but it’s important to note that China hasn’t prevented urbanization. it’s managed it. it’s not that it’s anti-urbanization. it’s anti-concentration. Compared even to India, which is dominated by its biggest cities, China’s city system is flat. It has many large cities that are fairly anonymous.” [Source]

Doctors in July diagnosed Ms. Zhao with aplastic anemia, a bone marrow condition that put her at high risk of infection. They estimated her treatment would cost at least 400,000 to 500,000 yuan, or roughly $65,000 to $82,000.

Despite years of work, the 26-year-old waitress couldn’t pay for it. Like many of China’s 269 million migrant workers, she bounced from city to city and job to job after leaving her home village to seek a better life. As a result, her employers—mostly small restaurants and noodle stands—haven’t contributed to her account under China’s medical-insurance system

Ms. Zhao could have received coverage under a new rural medical-insurance plan, but only if she moved back to her home province of Guizhou, where job prospects for her fiancé were slim. And before she could even apply for reimbursement back home, she would have to pay the 56,000 yuan she owed to the hospital in Wuhan where she had been receiving blood transfusions and other treatment. [Source]

The hukou system was enacted in 1958 as away to limit movement between the countryside and cities. At that time, the Chinese Communist Party was explicitly anti-urban and antibusiness. After economic reform began in 1978, the hukou became increasingly anachronistic as millions of migrant workers left farms and villages for new jobs in factories and private companies in the cities. Yet they were penalized because, without local household registration papers, these migrants were denied access to public health care, education, and other social services.

The new system, however, will be only a partial fix. Discrepancies between rural and urban tax collection will gradually be phased out, but access to services will still be linked to location. While smaller cities may be willing to accept newly registered residents, the governments of China’s leading metropolises—including Beijing and Shanghai—are overburdened and still actively trying to discourage new residents (other than wealthy arrivals) from putting down roots. […] [Source]

Many budget kindergartens in rural Beijing mostly catering to the children of migrant workers were ordered to close ahead of the new school year, with some citing safety concerns, but once again local governments did not tell parents how else to educate their offspring.

Teachers and administrators at the schools said they started receiving notices from local governments in May requiring them to close. Some have followed the order, but others were defying it.

[…] The government’s reasons were sound, critics said, but the move still amounts to discrimination against migrant workers. The government has essentially put the children out of school or forced them to separate from their parents by returning to their hometowns, they say. Schools backed by the government are much more expensive and many do not accept students without a Beijing hukou.

[…] It is unclear how the government intends to deal with the students who attended the kindergartens that were closed. Migrant children can attend a Beijing public school only if their parents can present five documents proving their employment and temporary residency in the capital. In practice, few migrant workers can gather all the paperwork. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/education-gap-remains-hukou-gaokao-reforms/feed/0Drawing the News: Full Moon Fantasyhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/drawing-news-full-moon-fantasy/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/drawing-news-full-moon-fantasy/#commentsMon, 08 Sep 2014 21:47:34 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=176967For the Mid-Autumn Festival, cartoonist zwxrl illustrates a story he likes to tell his friends. In a distant land, an old woman waits for her son to return from war victorious, but doubts she’ll ever see him again. She has no idea what will come knocking at her door.

CDT has broken the full cartoon into panels for ease of reading in English. View the original format at CDT Chinese.

Full Moon

In this poor, remote mountain hamlet

Lives a heartbroken old granny…

From the moment I sent my son to the battlefield… I had no hope that he would ever return…

TaTaTa! the rush of footsteps

Ma! I’m back!

I’d rather you had died for your country than desert and run home! What a disgrace!

P.S. I used to just tell people little stories like this and not bother putting them into cartoons. But my friends liked this one, so I decided to put it to paper. I’ll be more diligent from now on. See you all in the future~ zwxrlSeptember 1, 2014

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/09/drawing-news-full-moon-fantasy/feed/0This Week on CDT, August 8, 2014http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/08/week-cdt-august-8-2014/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/08/week-cdt-august-8-2014/#commentsSat, 09 Aug 2014 00:41:33 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=176115News that maligned socialite Guo Meimei admitted involvement in World Cup gambling and working as a call girl stoked discussion on and off the Internet. Netizens complained that the media devoted too much attention to covering the young woman’s predicament with less airtime given to coverage of a factory explosion in Jiangsu and an earthquake in Yunnan.

This spring, Weibo user 彭远文 shared a poem, said to be written by a mother living in Beijing without the right hukou, at the end of the spring semester:

My child
I am sorry
Looking at your inquisitive eyes
I am disheartened and ashamed
Your heart is so pure
How do I begin to tell you?
Your smile speaks of kindness
How do I dare tell you
Tell you that this city won’t let you to go to school
What kind of scene is this?
What should I do?
I have been choking on my words for days
How do I explain to you,
Explain that this country is not ours
Or rather, that we are not of this country
You may not yet fully understand the heaviness of hardship
But I know
The seeds of discrimination have already been planted in your subconscious
The whole world seems to know China’s power
Yet an ordinary mother is powerless to send her innocent child to school
How absurd this is
Anxiety and restlessness
Grief and pain
Have become the labels of motherhood
After sleepless nights
After thinking of every possibility
I still can’t find a way for you to study by your mother’s side
My child
I am sorry

Many people consider the unified system a symbolic breakthrough. Some experts say the dual system will not go away, and that reform is far away from the goal of providing people with equal access to public services and allowing them to move freely across the country.

The unified system will not represent progress if the way public services are doled out is not changed, experts say.

[…] The difference in levels of public services enjoyed by people in rural and urban areas has been a major barrier preventing the free movement of people around the country.

Last year authorities in Deqing County, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, said they wanted all residents to get equal access to public services. They found that 33 such services were involved, but officials were only able to level the playing field for 17.

The aim of the reform announced by the cabinet is to provide people across the country with the same level of public services. One way to do this is to improve what is being offered in rural areas by providing better pension, education and health benefits. The other way is to provide public services to all permanent residents of cities. [Source]

In the latest bid to remove obstacles to its urbanization drive, China on Wednesday announced plans to help about 100 million people settle in towns and cities by 2020.

A circular on the household registration, or “hukou,” system said China will remove limits in townships and small cities, relax restrictions in medium-sized cities, and set qualifications for big cities.

[…] Just like all other popular reforms launched in China recently, loosening the grip on hukou registration will no doubt contribute to China’s future reforms and its pursuit of social justice.

Turning hundreds of millions of rural dwellers into urban consumers could also generate a dynamic driving force for the world’s second-largest economy. [Source]

Though the Chinese government has decided to relax restrictions for migrant workers to seek permanent resident status in towns, small and medium-sized cities, the long-awaited reform faces indifference from many nostalgic migrant workers.

Only 10.7 percent of people surveyed by the statistics bureau of southwest China’s Sichuan Province said they are willing to register their resident permit, or “hukou,” in cities.

The uninterested migrant workers believe the hukou is more advantageous in rural areas than in cities. Among the issues they worry about most is their old-age care, house-buying opportunities and unemployment in cities, showed the research, which questioned 3,000 migrant workers aged 18 to 65 in nine cities in Sichuan in April and May. [Source]

China’s explosive economic growth plays a part in shifting the equation. Rural hukou in developed coastal regions have become more valuable as land prices have risen swiftly. In wealthy eastern Zhejiang province, the number of rural hukou holders switching to urban hukou totaled189,000 in 2010, a 67 percent drop from more than 570,000 in 2004. In 2010, several well-publicized stories emerged about urban civil servants trying to claw back the rural hukou they had given up.

[…] For those in Chinese cyberspace, of whom roughly 27 percent live in rural areas, the rural hukou’s abolition is worrisome for many who see it as changing the rules of the game just when the game was becoming slightly fairer. “Do I want to give up my rural hukou?” One user on Weibo, China’s Twitter, asked. “No, because it means losing a sense of belonging and security. If I lose my job in the city, I’d be out on the street. Land is my lifeline.” Another agreed, “As soon as the rural hukou is worth something, they take away the [urban-rural] distinction and, with that, the little land that we are entitled to.” One user was convinced authorities do not “care about rural residents” but instead, “just want to get some land.” [Source]

The Chinese government issued proposals on Wednesday to break down barriers that a nationwide household registration system has long imposed between rural and urban residents and among regions, reinforcing inequality, breeding discontent and hampering economic growth.

Yet even as officials promoted easier urbanization and the goal of permanently settling an additional 100 million rural people in towns and cities by 2020, they said changes to the system — which links many government entitlements to a person’s official residence, even if that person has long since moved away — must be gradual and must protect big cities like Beijing.

[…] The government also said, as it had before, that it would try to ease barriers that deny places in schools, health care, and family-planning and other public services to residents who do not have local household registration papers. Many city governments have resisted such changes, and urban residents fear the erosion of their privileges. [Source]

Xu Xiaoqing, director of the rural economy research department at the State Council’s Development Research Centre, said the move was just a start.

“The removal of the distinction in the hukou only makes a difference on paper. The real difference will be made when the gap in terms of social benefits is filled,” he said. “There’s still a long way to go before there is an equalised social security net among different regions. The fundamental solution is to unify social security [nationwide].”

[…] Professor Kam Wing Chan of the University of Washington said the wide variations in the quality of locally administered social welfare and social services had made “the elimination of the rural and urban hukou classifications insignificant”. [Source]

The reports pit the registered rate [for those with local hukou residence registration], which excludes more than 200 million migrant workers, against the newer surveyed rate, whose methodology is undisclosed. The absence of reliable figures on employment has kept economists guessing on how deep of a slowdown China can tolerate without affecting jobs.

“The new survey-based unemployment data should fill some gaps, especially on calculating the unemployment rate of the population that’s not locally registered,” said Yao Wei, a China economist at Societe Generale SA in Paris. The urban registered jobless figures are “almost meaningless,” she said.

The 4.08 percent number given by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security was unchanged from March, a report from the official Xinhua News Agency showed. By contrast, the National Development and Reform Commission said on its website the surveyed rate of 5.05 percent had declined for four straight months, without elaborating. [Source]

The trouble is that the official unemployment rate—4.08% at last measure—is widely seen as useless as it barely budges in good times and bad. It relies on workers to register at local benefit centers, which misses China’s massive migrant worker population.

In 2008, when the global financial crisis destroyed 30 million Chinese manufacturing jobs by some measures, the rate barely rose. Masses of migrant workers returning home to the countryside revealed the true extent of layoffs. Mr. Li has targeted 10 million urban jobs per year, but this measure is also flawed, relying on a survey biased toward state-owned enterprises and could miss changes in the private sector.

[…] What may be the best measure of China’s employment situation is a state secret. Beijing’s leaders rely on a separate employment survey taken as frequently as every month but which isn’t normally made public. In April, an official let slip that this unemployment rate was 5.17%, a percentage point higher than the official one. Premier Li himself seemed to mention the rate in an op-ed article in September 2013, when he said the unemployment rate was 5% in the first half of 2013. Without knowing where this rate has been historically, these tidbits are of limited value. [Source]

I’ve always introduced my hometown as “China’s Gold Capital.” On Beijing’s Wangfujing Pedestrian Street (王府井步行街), there’s a huge chunk of gold ore displayed in a glass case for tourists to see. Every time I take a friend for a walk on Wangfujing, I always point proudly to it and say, “Look, from my hometown.” The presence of this rock sometimes gives me the illusion that Zhaoyuan is really close to the capital, merely a simple, straight line.

But, the May 28 homicide that shocked the nation has made it impossible for me to be proud. As Cui Yongyuan has said, this incident has brought shame on the whole nation. Zhaoyuan, the erstwhile glittering golden capital, has in one night become the shame of China.

I can’t sleep at night, not just because of this one incident— there is a lot more. I have left Zhaoyuan for 14 years, and I have been wanting to go back in recently years, dreaming up ideas for returning home and starting a business. But every time I visited, I was beset by profound disappointment.

[…] During the 2013 Spring Festival, I had a reunion with my primary school classmates. I told them I was thinking about moving back home to work the land. They sighed and said, “Work the land? What land?” They told me that all the land had been forcefully requisitioned. With farmers who did not want to give up their land, their vegetable greenhouses and tractors were set on fire in the night and they themselves were beaten up and handicapped – property destroyed and family broken. [Source]

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/06/kind-place-zhaoyuan/feed/0Retiring Migrant Workers Have No Place to Call Homehttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/06/retiring-migrant-workers-place-call-home/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/06/retiring-migrant-workers-place-call-home/#commentsTue, 17 Jun 2014 00:06:23 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=174103Caixin’s Lan Fang describes the predicament of China’s first generation of migrant workers, many of whom are finding themselves with little means of support for their now looming retirement:

The pension system covering urban workers has been rapidly expanding since the 1990s and now covers 324 million employees. But as numbers from the National Bureau of Statistics show, last year only 15.7 percent of 269 million urban migrants participated in the scheme. Barriers for migrant participation include the relatively high individual and employer contributions, the often temporary nature of migrant work and the difficulty transferring retirement funds across regions.

[…] The paradoxes boil down to problems within the social security system, which is in urgent need of continuous reform. “Regional differences, the urban-rural gap and a fragmented system are making the compensation policy more complicated,” Wang [Yanzhong, director of the Labor and Social Welfare Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences] said.

[…] The judicial system lacks a review mechanism to investigate violations of the constitution. Taken together with the population pressure Beijing is facing, this is bad news for the first generation of urbanized migrants like Zhang as they retire.

They have lost touch with the countryside, but the city is not ready to become a home for them either. [Source]

More surprisingly, perhaps, is the kinds of officials were ranked as second-, third-, and fourth-most disliked officials: school managers, hospital managers and village heads. Though at least in theory, such officials are tasked with serving the public, the report’s author, Tang Jun, says that since such officials control scarce resources and have limited restrictions on their power, they may be easily corrupted.

[…] The report also broke down official unpopularity according to province and found that southern Guangdong’s officials received the nation’s lowest marks. According to the report’s “image crisis scale,” Beijing-based officials also ranked second-to-last among residents, accounting for 4.7% of all 2,074 cases that negatively affected the image of the government, the report said. Guangdong accounted for 8.4% of such incidents.

One of the reason why residents might view officials in a prosperous province such as Guangdong with such resentment, analysts say, is that the province has been home to a number of new policies that may have created friction as they’ve been implemented. Such policies in recent years have included loosening the country’s hukou system and implementing the country’s second-child policy. [Source]

Tang Jun, director of a crisis management research center at the Renmin University of China, said that the three regions [Guangdong, Beijing, and third-ranked Henan] have large populations with more migrant workers, which increases the difficulty of social governance.

Guangdong and Beijing are also known for their vibrant media industry, which results in high exposure of public incidents, Tang said.

]]>http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/05/chengguan-ranked-chinas-least-loved-public-officials/feed/0Urbanization: Where China’s Future Will Happenhttp://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/04/urbanization-chinas-future-will-happen/
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2014/04/urbanization-chinas-future-will-happen/#commentsWed, 16 Apr 2014 23:48:19 +0000http://chinadigitaltimes.net/?p=171528In a special report at The Economist, James Miles examines urbanization in China, described by economist Joseph Stiglitz as one of “‘two keys’ to mankind’s development in the 21st century.” The report’s introduction lays out first the scale—China’s urban population grew by a “United States plus three Britains” in thirty years—and then the tremendous importance of China’s urbanization for the future of the country as a whole:

Getting cities right will help China to keep growing fast for years to come. Getting them wrong would be disastrous, bringing worsening inequality (which the World Bank says has approached “Latin American levels”, although Chinese officials insist it has recently been improving), the spread of slums, the acceleration of global climate change (cities consume three-quarters of China’s energy, which comes mainly from coal) and increasing social unrest.

[…] All the most important reforms that Mr Xi needs to tackle involve the movement to China’s cities. He must give farmers the same property rights as urban residents so they can sell their homes (which is currently all but impossible) and leave the land with cash in hand. He must sort out the mess of local-government finances, which depend heavily on grabbing land from farmers and selling it to developers. He must loosen the grip of state-owned enterprises on the commanding heights of the economy and make them hand over more of their profits to the government. He must move faster to clean up the urban environment, especially its noxious air, and prevent the growth of China’s cities from exacerbating climate change. And he must start giving urban residents a say in how their cities are run. [Source]

The challenge for Xi Jinping, China’s president, and his team is as immense as the cities themselves. But there are two obvious steps for them to take. The first is to give farmers property rights and thus the ability to sell their land. If the market were allowed to operate, prices would be high. Overall, China has less habitable space than America but four times as many people. Much of the country is mountain or desert, unusable for development. High prices, reflecting this shortage, would force urban planners to regard land as a scarce resource and to use it efficiently. That would discourage them from allowing American-style sprawl and encourage them to build dense, energy-efficient European-style cities in which people walk, cycle or take public transport to work.

The second necessary step is to open up decision-making. One reason why so many Chinese cities are grim is that residents have so little say in how they are planned, built and run. If people had the right to elect their mayors and legislators, they would—assuming they behaved like city-dwellers elsewhere in the world—insist on planning controls to constrain development and improve the environment.

The document unveiled in March called the government’s urbanisation plan “people-centred”. If the next stage of China’s phenomenal urban transformation is to bring prosperity and stability rather than conflict and chaos, the party needs to live up to the phrase. [Source]

Other chapters explore issues such as environmental impacts, economic sustainability, and social division at greater length, while China editor Rob Gifford discussed the report with its author in a video conversation:

China has finally put a price tag on its massive plan for urbanization, and it’s a big one. The cost of bringing an additional couple of hundred million people to cities over the next seven years? Some 42 trillion yuan ($6.8 trillion), announced an official from China’s Ministry of Finance last week.

“The flaws in the previous model, in which urban construction mostly relied on land sales and fiscal revenue, have emerged in recent years, and the model is unsustainable,” warned Wang Bao’an, vice minister of finance, on March 17. His comments came one day after China’s State Council and the Central Committee of the Communist Party released the “National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020),”which aims to lift the proportion of Chinese living in cities to 60 percent by 2020, from 53.7 percent now.

[…] “Urbanization is a powerful engine for China’s sustained and healthy economic growth, said Lou Jiwei, Chinese Minister of Finance in a news release on March 25. “We need to accelerate reform of the fiscal and tax system as well as investment and financing mechanisms,” he said, citing the need for private investment into public infrastructure projects using the public-private partnership model. [Source]

How realistic is this plan, with its reported price tag of $6.8 trillion? China has performed economic wonders before. The nation’s adoption of a market economy, starting in the late 1970s, helped to lift 500 million Chinese out of poverty over the ensuing decades.

[…] “If managed well, urbanization can create enormous opportunities, allowing innovation and new ideas to emerge, saving energy, land and natural resources, managing climate and the risk of disasters,” Sri Mulyani Indrawati, managing director and COO of the World Bank, noted Tuesday at a conference in Beijing.

“Globally, almost 80 percent of GDP is generated in cities,” she continued. “It will be difficult for any country to reach middle-income status and beyond without getting urbanization right.”

But getting that right also means a dramatic shift in governmental and financial policies. China’s economic growth has been fueled by investment, rather than productivity. And the nation’s recent urbanization has relied on land conversion, which has led to social unrest by rural residents whose land has been expropriated. Urban sprawl has also caused an alarming increase in pollution. […] [Source]

China needs a new path to greater urbanization that will be efficient, inclusive and sustainable. Through better allocation of land, labor, and capital this new model can share the benefits of urbanization more widely than in the past. And it can be environmentally sustainable while ensuring China’s food security.

This is why we call it ‘New Urbanization.’

In this new model the government will have a different role. It will support rather than supplant market forces. It will allow China’s cities to grow more organically and efficiently. New urbanization is not merely about bricks and mortar. It puts people at the center of the strategy.

New urbanization must be affordable and it will be. On current trends, China’s cities would spend some $5.3 trillion on infrastructure over the next 15 years. But with more efficient, denser cities China can save some $1.4 trillion in infrastructure spending — or 15 percent of last year’s GDP.

New urbanization requires a comprehensive package of reforms, recognizing that the issues are closely intertwined. They have to be addressed comprehensively: Piecemeal reform will not solve the problems. […] [Source]

The first political risk of urbanization is that it will strain central-local relations. As I’ve argued before, the importance of central and local government relations in China is vastly understated by foreign analysts. It will also be central to many of the challenges inherent in China’s economic rebalance.

Nowhere is this truer than with urbanization. If the CCP is to successfully implement its urbanization plan, it will have to fundamentally reorient central-local relations. In particular, it will have to allocate larger budgets to China’s local governments—or empower them to raise greater revenues on their own—to allow them to fund the expansion of social services to current and future rural migrant workers.

[…] Besides the strain it will place on central-local relations, urbanization will also increase the potential for mass unrest in China. It’s no secret that there is already a massive amount of political unrest in China. The Chinese Academy of Governance, for instance, has estimated that the number of protests in China doubled between the years of 2006 and 2010, when there were 180,000 reported mass incidents. […] [Source]

There are two main areas where it falls short. First, the hukou liberalisation focuses on cities with under 5m people. Yet most new jobs are being created in the 16 big cities with populations of more than 5m, and most of the dodgy government debt seems to be concentrated in the smaller cities whose officials are therefore unwilling to fork out for benefits for new urbanites. Large cities can give urban hukou, but only on a complicated points-based system which tends to favour the prosperous, giving graduates and skilled workers a better chance. When tried elsewhere, that ends up allowing mainly the elite to migrate. The points-based system should be scrapped and the door opened faster and wider.

The second problem is bigger. Though migrants hate the way they are discriminated against in cities, many are nervous about accepting an urban hukou, even if offered, as they do not see it as a reliable source of security. Urban welfare systems are so new and so imperfect that migrants doubt, with good reason, that they will be able to draw on unemployment benefits or a promised pension, especially if they move to another city. So they keep one foot in the countryside, holding onto their tiny patch of land and never making the break. Even if they want to sell their land, they are still not allowed to do so. The plan thus needs two other important strands: more cash for public services in the cities, and allowing the establishment of a rural land market, so that the buying and selling of land could help enrich farmers just as it has enriched urbanites. [Source]

Crucially, the plan does not suggest when the hukou system might be scrapped altogether. And it still allows bigger cities, which migrants prefer, to continue usinghukou barriers as a way of trying to limit population growth. In the 16 cities with more than 5m people, officials will be allowed to give hukou only to migrants who gain a certain number of points (in cities that have experimented with this, points are awarded on the basis of educational qualifications, property ownership and other factors that rule out most migrants). Even in the smallest cities only migrants with “legal and stable” work and accommodation—which many do not have—will be able to get urban hukou.

Local governments are likely to interpret this as strictly as they can. They are fearful of having to spend a lot more on public services such as health care, education and subsidised housing, which barely reach most non-urban hukou holders. The new plan gives few details of how beefing up these services will be paid for, an omission that suggests much bickering remains to be done. It sets a modest target for urbanisation of 60% in 2020, up from nearly 54% today. This would imply a slowing down of the growth rate; that is not a bad signal to send given how local governments have been using high urbanisation targets as a pretext to continue grabbing land from farmers and engaging in an orgy of often wasteful construction. [Source]

Vice Minister of Public Security Huang Ming told reporters this week that the tight controls on who lives where under the hukou, or household-registration, system, won’t be abandoned anytime soon, at least not in the biggest and most attractive cities.

“I wouldn’t say there’s no hope in getting a hukou,” Mr. Huang said at a news briefing Wednesday, referring to strict population controls in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. “I think there’s hope, just not as high as other big cities, especially not as high as smaller cities.”

[…] The government has stressed it will keep a tight grip on cities with populations of more than 5 million.

Mr. Huang said this is necessary due to practical considerations. Cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are already seeing huge strains on their resources and the environment. Their populations need to be slimmed down, he said. [Source]